1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to improvements in electric circuits. More particularly, the invention relates to improvements particularly suited for noisy and compact high-temperature environments. In particular, the present invention relates specifically to a unique circuit configuration developed using silicon on insulator based solid state components to provide a low-profile noise-resistant high-temperature operating environment electric gate driving circuit. This circuit model and the design techniques may also apply to future components such as HTSOI, SiC, BJTs, JFETs, MOSFETs, silicon carbide, gallium nitride, and the like.
2. Description of the Known Art
As will be appreciated by those skilled in the art, gate driving circuits are known in various forms. Patents include:
U.S. Pat. No. 5,055,722, issued to Latos et al. on Oct. 8, 1991, entitled GATE DRIVE FOR INSULATED GATE DEVICE; U.S. Pat. No. 5,206,540 issued to de Sa e Silva et al. on Apr. 27, 1993 entitled TRANSFORMER ISOLATED DRIVE CIRCUIT; U.S. Pat. No. 5,550,436, issued to Houk on Aug. 27, 1996 entitled MOS GATE DRIVER INTEGRATED CIRCUIT FOR BALLAST CIRCUITS; and U.S. Pat. No. 5,900,683, issued to Rinchart et al. on May 4, 1999 entitled ISOLATED GATE DRIVER FOR POWER SWITCHING DEVICE AND METHOD FOR CARRYING OUT THE SAME. Each of these patents is hereby incorporated by reference in their entirety. These patents fail to teach the advantages, method, or apparatus of the present invention.
Relevant articles particular to the present invention include Shihong Park; Jahns, T. M., “A novel dead-time elimination method using single-input enhanced phase-leg configuration”, 38th Industry Applications Conference, IAS 2003, Volume 3, Issue, 12-16 October 2003, pp. 2033-2040; and S. Round, M. Heldwein, J. Kolar, I. Hofsajer, and P. Friedrichs, “A SiC JFET Driver for a 5 kW, 150 kHz Three-Phase PWM Converter”, IAS 2005, pp. 410-416. These articles are limited in their teachings.
Other application notes disclose information relevant to gate driving circuits. Typical integrated circuit (IC) designs are known such as IR2111 sold by INTERNATIONAL RECTIFIER of 233 Kansas Street, El Segundo, Calif. and their Application Note AN-978 provides a good background of the basic circuit layouts for gate drivers on Page 23. These gate driver ICs cannot be used reliably at ambient temperatures in excess of 150° C. due to the inability of the silicon-based circuit.
To address these issues, the present application presents a suite of high temperature gate driver circuits capable of operating at ambient temperatures up to 300° C. In addition to high temperature operation, some of these gate drivers were developed to address the specific needs of silicon carbide (SiC) devices.